Tracing ivory from a sixteenth century shipwreck
Geneticists have added a lot of new knowledge about elephant relationships and phylogeography over the last few years. One of the big areas of advance has be...
Geneticists have added a lot of new knowledge about elephant relationships and phylogeography over the last few years. One of the big areas of advance has be...
Robert Broom, in the first paragraph of his paper, “Further Evidence on the Structure of the South African Pleistocene Anthropoids”, says it better than I co...
In the field of human evolution, every so often a scientist will note the absurdity of talking about “anatomically modern humans”. Biologists don’t talk abou...
Charles Darwin, in On the Origin of Species, introduced the idea that the relationships between organisms form a tree.
Sherwood Washburn was a prominent biological anthropologist of the mid-twentieth century, best known as the architect of the “New Physical Anthropology” move...
Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist well known in the mid-twentieth century for his popular writing about human evolution and science more generally.
I learned mammalian systematics and cladistics around the same time that Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell published their 1997 book, Classification of Mammals:...
I have open Johann Blumbenbach’s A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, in the 1807 English translation by William Lawrence. The full text is on Google Books.
Franz Weidenreich, in his 1943 article, “The ‘Neanderthal Man’ and the ancestors of ‘Homo sapiens’” (p. 44):
Here’s a painful analogy deployed by Arthur Keith (1924:253) for Neandertal dental anatomy:
The University of Toronto has a really nice article by Romi Levine that looks at the work of anatomical illustrators in the history of Canadian medical scien...
Last year Atlas Obscura published a review of the book Black Tudors, by Miranda Kaufmann: “The Africans Who Called Tudor England Home”.
The New York Times Magazine last week printed a wonderful long article on the history of women as computer programmers: “The Secret History of Women in Codin...
In scientific English, today we often distinguish between “monkeys” and “apes” in a meaningful way. Apes are the tail-less primates of the Old World that are...
Lee Berger and I have a new article out in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that looks at what may be the biggest issue in hominin taxonomy for ...
The New York Times reports on a revival of the agricultural variety: “Finding Lost Apples and Reviving a Beloved Cider”.
Priscilla Wehi and coworkers have a neat article in The Conversation describing a recent research paper that looked at traditional sayings in Māori, to try t...
National Public Radio (U.S.) has a story about one of the evils of Belgian colonization of the Congo: King Leopold brought hundreds of Congolese to Belgium t...
In the South China Morning Post, a great story featuring Indonesian archaeologist Emanuel “Wahyu” Saptomo: “Indonesian archaeologist recalls Flores ‘hobbit’ ...
Following on my last post about massive genealogy research, the Globe and Mail has an interesting story about how genealogical and census information allowed...
Charles C. Mann has written a historical account of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb as a part of Smithsonian magazine’s retrospective on the year 1968: “T...
I’ve been doing a bit of reading about hookworm infection for an essay, and I happened across a piece by Rebecca Kreston from Discover’s “Body Horrors” a few...
The other day I happened back upon an old post from 2005, the first full year of the blog: “NSF and data access”. The post recounts my perspective on the pro...
Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has published a nice post about early doubters of the Piltdown fossils: “Piltdown Man and the Dualist Contention”.
Sick burn by Bruce Trigger, 1984:
William. W. Howells (1980), writing on the way that new discoveries have affected the interpretation of Homo erectus:
The discovery of hominin fossils at Sterkfontein, South Africa, was eighty years ago this year. Recognizing the occasion, Jason Heaton, Travis Pickering and ...
Annalee Newitz describes a study in Science that examines a semi-legendary flood at the dawn of Chinese civilization, which turns out to have been a real eve...
I really like this blog post reviewing the discovery of botulinum toxin by Rebecca Kreston: “The Bad Sausage & The Discovery of Botulism”.
Earnest Hooton, discussing the Taung Child in Up from the Ape (p. 284):
Vox writers Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer, and Brian Resnick compile the results of a survey they sent to scientists around the world, with the single question: ...
A new Kickstarter-funded documentary is coming out about Dr. John Brinkley, the Kansas quack best known for his goat gland operations during the Roaring Twen...
I know the Hannibal meadow muffin story has done the rounds this week, but I find the approach very interesting: Tracing a historical invasion by looking for...
A fascinating Sunday story by Leanne Shapton in the New York Times Magazine about the mysterious end of the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic: “Artifact...
Again from Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind today, Don Johanson describes his thoughts upon the question of whether to place the Hadar jaw remains (later at...
From Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, p. 288, a very good concise description of why Johanson and White did not choose...
Darren Naish has a very nice post about one aspect of the saga of Piltdown Man: the scientists who never believed that the jaw and calvaria of the specimen a...
From Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill, a passage synthesizing the role of endemic parasites in weakening entire populations:
Ars Technica has a long article in honor of the anniversary of the Apollo 13 by writer Lee Hutchinson, giving background to the famous accident that the movi...
California Sunday Magazine has a feature profiling farmers losing their water to nut growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley: “Dry”. It’s a story of wells...
Once upon a time, the U.S. had a President who could write articles about human evolution: Theodore Roosevelt!
The Renaissance Mathematicus enlisted the historian Melinda Baldwin to write about the early history of the word, “scientist”, originally coined by William W...
Re: “The genetic complexity of recent migration into southern Africa”
In the New York Times, Alan Dershowitz reviews the book, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind–and Changed the History of Free Speech...
Via a reader, this article in the New York Times about the American Historical Association’s vote to recommend that newly-minted PhDs be allowed to hide thei...
An increasing number of authors of scientific papers are writing good blog summaries of their work. The really great part is that the authors tend to give ba...
NPR has a short piece with an interesting historical story about old-time back-to-nature fitness fanatics: “Paleo Diet Echoes Physical Culture Movement Of Ye...
From The Guardian: “Richard III archaeologists to return to Leicester site in search of lost knight”.
So after they found the bones of Richard III under a parking lot, now everybody is apparently going crazy to dig up bones under parking lots, churchyards, un...
The Wall Street Journal has an inspiring story of a hairdresser who turned her curiosity about Roman hairstyles into novel scholarship: “On Pins and Needles:...
I was enjoying a Nature discussion of “radium age” sci-fi literature, when this line caught me by surprise:
The AP is running a story about a recent genetic study probing the ancestry of the Melungeons.
This is maybe as good a definition of science as one could hope for, from the journals of early Canadian fur trader David Thompson:
Ars Technica has an engrossing article by James Grimmelmann about the rise and fall of HavenCo. The firm promised data security and anonymity based on the id...
The Guardian has an interview with George Dyson about his new book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. The book reviews the early histo...
A story by Susan Donaldson James of a unique genetic disorder and the social stigma of inbreeding in Appalachia: “Fugates of Kentucky: Skin Bluer than Lake L...
Sandwalk: “What William the Conqueror’s Companions Teach Us about Effective Population Size”.
Last week I linked to an article about the dispersal of the potato (“How the Potato Changed the World”). Smithsonian also has an interview with Alfred Crosby...
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World”, focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Eur...
The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: “Wouldnt It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasnt Shakespeare?”
Razib Khan posts an interview with author Charles C. Mann, whose new book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created is an account of the social and eco...
Speaking of Jo Marchant, she has a long article in the current Nature about the mummy DNA controversy (“Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharoah’s DNA”).
The NY Times has a profile of economist Robert W. Fogel (“Technology Advances; Humankind Supersizes”). Fogel, along with other historical economists, has wor...
The Telegraph has done a puff piece about the Genographic testing of Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson.
I like this quote from Neil Stephenson, in his work, “In the beginning was the command line.”
Remembering Ham, 50 years later: “The chimp that took America into space.”
Mummies are always trouble. I hate to say it. You see, in my line of work we can do an awful lot with a skeleton. We’re usually down to a few pieces of bone,...
Brian Switek reviews the American Experience program, Dinosaur Wars, which covered the scientific rivalry between paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Dr...
Gina Kolata writes an interesting story about the genetics of a pituitary giant (“New Story Writ by a Giant’s DNA”). The individual in question is a man know...
More news about Amelia Earhart:
Vintage Space is a blog written by a historian of spaceflight, which has lately been focusing on the development of landing systems in the Mercury, Gemini an...
I found an interesting, short paper doing a bit of forensic investigation on Charlemagne Ruhli:Charlemagne:2010:
Bray and colleagues Bray:Ashkenazi:2010 report on genotyping of 471 people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. This is one of the largest samples of a single human ...
An interesting study has shown how people in the samurai class of Edo period Japan were poisoning their children with lead. The results are reported in a cur...
Eric Michael Johnson, formerly of Primate Diaries, writes:
Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians begins with a chapter summarizing grand theories of demography and social transformation among near-prehistoric people...
James McWilliams comments on the simple, local foods movement: “The Persistence of the Primitive Food Movement”. His theme, with several interesting historic...
A reader passes along a link to the Popular Science archive, now available free.
Nature this week gave Jared Diamond the chance to review two books about archaeology and “collapse” – The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age (which...
The other New York Times Magazine article that I found interesting this weekend (following up on yesterday’s post) is about the Texas State Board of Educatio...
Razib’s “10 questions for Peter Turchin”, population dynamist and historical theoretician, is well worth reading.
I’m always skeptical when pathologists attempt to diagnose the ills of historical figures. Even if there are medical records or abundant attestations of symp...
Few things are worse than a skeptic sloppy about checking his facts. For example, the “Bad Science” feature of LiveScience claims that we’re not getting any ...
I’ve intermittently been reading through William Provine’s The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. It’s related to a project simmering on my back bur...
I think that this NY Times story by Noam Cohen, titled “In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide,” is just fascinating. It’s an old story (from e...
New Scientist is running a nice article titled, “1709: The year that Europe froze.” It hits many interesting points – at the very dawn of systematic temperat...
I’m very sad about Andrew Wyeth’s death this week. He was one of the first artists I learned about in school, and I have always been inspired by his work.
Here’s a story from earlier this month in New Scientist:
Ancient DNA technology may make it possible to test some very interesting hypotheses about recent evolutionary change in human populations.
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
I happened to be reading about the scholastic revival of Cicero, in the book Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler. It’s a really interesting...
OK, so they’ve identified the body of Copernicus.
Mickey Kaus’ twisted take on what history dooms us to:
From the introduction of G. G. Simpson, 1943, Tempo and Mode in Evolution, p. xv:
I picked up a copy of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis this week at a book sale. It’s funny – the book was a review copy and bears the followi...
This is one doofy story:
Until this summer, I had only a vague idea of who Nikolai Vavilov was. I knew he had been Dobzhansky’s mentor, and that like all Russian biologists, he had s...
This New Scientist story is from January, but it’s interesting – streams and rivers across the eastern US were much more extensively terraformed by damming t...
The immune system’s long memory:
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren’t teaching people to revere the right nineteent...
Carl Zimmer puts in a nice entry on the new flounder evolution paper, covering the history of the question including the debate between Darwin and Mivart abo...
Elizabeth Pennisi, reporting from the Evolution meetings, has turned in an article about how biologists are using the 19th century plant records of Henry Dav...
An interesting profile of Buckminster Fuller in the current New Yorker, by author Elizabeth Kolbert. The occasion is a retrospective exhibition at the Whitne...
I like the idea of book reviews for really old books. It eliminates the risk that you’ll get stuck writing a review of a really bad book, because, well, ever...
Yesterday I ran across a piece by Tim Radford from earlier this year in the Guardian, titled, "The book that changed the world." It's a short article about ...
The sad part of this story is that nobody cares about the identity of the other guy:
I'm just doing some background reading about the body size of pygmies (for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons) and I thought it worth making a note of ...
T. Ryan Gregory (Genomicron) has been writing a long series of posts looking into the history of junk DNA. He's focusing on what research articles were sayi...
A letter to the editors of Nature by Jasmina Muzinic notes the new translation of Darwin's works into Croatian:
This Saturday (2/8/2008) is Darwin Day here at UW. My lab will be putting a display together at the Geology Museum in the afternoon -- you can find a full s...
The Beagle Project Blog lists me as one of the top ten senders of traffic to their site, which reports on the efforts to replicate the original voyage:
Norwegian scientists are digging her up for DNA testing:
I read this post by Grant McCracken some months ago, and I wanted to remind myself of it on September 1. So here it is:
What an interesting book review by Abigail Zuber, of a new book about Charles Lindbergh's medical collaboration with famous surgeon Alexis Carrel. Lindbergh...
Alfred Crosby gives a short quote from chapter 19 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and I found it interesting enough to look for the full context. Voya...
This is a nice passage by Alfred Crosby about the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century historians:
A reader asked me this morning when the word "paleoanthropology" first came into use. I happen to be on an OED kick lately (for reasons that will soon becom...
Remember that story from last month about how fruit flies have some kind of free will because they navigate their flight in nondeterministic directions?
I think many biologists have a pretty vague picture of why Linnaeus was important. To some, he probably seems banal -- how exciting could it be to make all ...
Not the work of Georgia O'Keefe, but of Carl Linnaeus according to this NY Times article observing the 300 years since his birth. The birthday was last week...
I found this passage in the discussion following T. Dale Stewart's paper, "The problem of the earliest claimed representatives of Homo sapiens," from the 19...
The Darwin Correspondence Project has put the text of 5000 Darwin letters online. The NY Times has a number of excerpts. Here's a good one:
I was checking on the Thomas Jefferson mastodon story for the last post, and I came across an episode I hadn't been aware of. After Edward Jenner's developm...
Afarensis reviews the book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, by Adrienne Mayor:
I really like this Neurophilosophy post on Dostoyevsky's epilepsy. It's a nice piece touching on history, literature, and psychology. Autobiographical detai...
Kim Hill and colleagues (2007) report in the current Journal of Human Evolution on the mortality profile of recent Hiwi hunter-gatherers. Here is their abst...
Regular readers of the blog will remember previous occasions when I have written about dental development in fossil humans. I am by no means an expert on th...
Jim Endersby presents a review of two recent books on Darwin -- a Variorum edition of the Origin, and a new edition of Darwin's correspondence -- in the Tim...
A book excerpt in the Telegraph by David Attenborough asks this question:
British physiologist Harry Rossiter suggests that ancient Greeks were more physically fit than modern endurance athletes:
After the post about education and lifespan, I noticed a different story about how large families reduce the lifespans of parents:
FuturePundit points me to a study of telomerase expression in mice. Here's the abstract:
I ran across this new paper by Jacinta Beehner and colleagues, which has a very intensive sampling of pregnancy outcomes in Amboseli baboons:
I've been working through the book, Evolutionary Game Theory, by Jörgen Weibull, and it has a really concise two-page history of game theory (as applie...
I'm reading a bit about risk in large animal hunting, and I ran across an article by Dereck Joubert on elephant hunting by lions in Botswana.
I got curious about drowning as a global cause of death tonight, so I did some research and found a paper by Etienne Krug et al. (2000).
The New York Times is carrying an article by Gina Kolata that discusses research on genetics and longevity. She has quotes from several big figures in the f...
Here's some good news in medicine:
This is one of the most beautiful openings to a paper, ever:
Science Blog has a press release regarding the research of Gary Steinman on dietary influences on twinning. I'm going to cite a lenghty passage, because it'...
An article in the Washington Post by Guy Gugliotta discusses the identity of Christopher Columbus, on the 500th anniversary of his death.
This NIH study reported by E. J. Mundell is curious:
I posted last year about a paper in Science by Sean Nee and colleagues, which showed that the idea of "life history invariants" was an illusion of flawed st...
Joanna Setchell and colleagues (2005) present observations on the sexual competition and reproductive success in mandrills. For a quick primer on mandrill s...
The Scientist has a very nice article titled "The Longevity Dividend", about attempts to treat diseases of aging with preventative biotechnology. Some pe...
I missed this story back in December about menopause in captive gorillas:
From the AP story "Mozart mystery just gets murkier":
A PNAS paper by Eileen Crimmins and Caleb Finch finds evidence that early infection, growth, and longevity are all linked:
I'm coming late to this story, but it's still timely! The New York Times has an op-ed by Clive Wynne linking the inspiration for the original King Kong to S...
Yes, it's the expensive bat testicle hypothesis:
The folks at Savage Minds are still whuppin' away on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, in posts About Yali, On cargo and cults - and Yali's question, D...
Martin and colleagues (2005) have a PNAS paper examining the coevolution of falciparum malaria (Plasmodium falciparum) with early humans.
On the subject of Craig Venter, I ran across this old interview from Bio-IT World magazine. It's pretty useful for a short first-hand account of his side of...
A Slate column by Meghan O'Roarke discusses the latest trend in male vilification:
If "short people got no reason to live", then why exactly do they live longer than tall people?
Just in time for school to start -- Slate is running a slide-show essay about Ernst Haeckel, including his life and work. It features some of his stunning a...
Via a reader: BBC is reporting that tuberculosis may have arisen in hominids as early as 3 million years ago.
Here's a study that won't be reported in the science press, but is much more important to evolutionary theory than anything else I've read this month.
I've seen a lot of attention to the new Ray Kurzweil book, Fanstastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, but only now have I seen a review by someone...
I've been reading Ron Amundson's new history of biology book, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought.
The History Channel is showing its new human evolution program, "Ape to Man" this Sunday, August 7, at 9:00 EDT / 8:00 CDT. The show has a website, which gi...
Reuters reports on a research study by Dr. Neri Laufer (Hadassah University Hospital, Jerusalem) into the genetic variation underlying fertility in older wo...
Every introductory class in biological anthropology talks about wisdom teeth, the common name for human third molars. Around ninety percent of my students i...
The New York Times reports a new study in JAMA on the mortality risk associated with different BMI classes. The study found that obesity and underweight cla...